A wren in the house foretells a death, while a tech-loving parrot aids a woman’s recovery. Crows’ misbehaviour suggests how the ‘natural’ order, ranked by men, may be challenged. A blur of bunting above an unassuming bog raises questions about how nature reserves were chosen. Should the oriole be named ‘green’ or golden? The flaws of field guides across decades prove that this is a feminist issue. A buzzard, scavenging a severed ewe’s leg, teaches taboos about curiosity.
Whose poo is the mammal scat uncovered in the attic, and should the swallows make their home inside yours? The nightjar’s churring brings on unease at racism and privilege dividing nature lovers, past and present. The skin of a Palestine sunbird provokes concern at the colonial origins of ornithology. And when a sparrowhawk makes a move on a murmuration, the starlings show how threat – in the shape of flood, climate change or illness – may be faced down.
Jasmine Donahaye is in pursuit of feeling ‘sharply alive’, understanding things on her own terms and undoing old lessons about how to behave. Here, she finally confronts fear: of violence and of the body’s betrayals, daring at last, to ‘get things wrong’.
Roaming across Wales, Scotland, California and the Middle East, she is unapologetically focused on the uniqueness of women’s experience of nature and the constraints placed upon it. Sometimes bristling, always ethical, Birdsplaining upends familiar ways of seeing the natural world.
สารบัญ
Birdsplaining: A Note Before Reading
1. Reading the Signs
2. Field Guides
3. Mansplaining the Wild
4. Boggy Ground
5. Curious Bodies
6. Uninvited Guests
7. Meetings at Dusk
8. What’s in a Name?
9. The Promise of Puffins
10. To Gawp at Birds
11. The Regard of Equals
12. Gannets
13. Risk Assessment
14. An Unkindness to Birdwatchers
Notes and Bibliographical Details
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Jasmine Donahaye’s work has appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian, and her documentary, ‘Statue No 1’, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her books include the memoir, Losing Israel (2015), winner of the nonfiction category in the Wales Book of the Year award; a biography of author Lily Tobias, The Greatest Need (2015), the basis for ‘O Ystalyfera i Israel’, broadcast by S4C; the cultural study Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (2012), and two collections of poetry: Misappropriations (2006) and Self-Portrait as Ruth (2009). She is a part-time professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University, and a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
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